Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Notes is dead As you may have noticed, I've generally refrained from commenting on articles/themes in the Notes/Groove/MSFT intersection zone (since I worked for both Lotus and Groove, etc.), but this column is way over the top and warrants a comment.

Groove is very useful in many contexts, and has strong synergy with Microsoft's products, but it's outrageous for Steve Gillmor to assert that Notes is dead because Groove added superficial Notes integration and because Ray Ozzie has been sharing his weblog thoughts on his (excellent) weblog. Anyone who has used Notes effectively (i.e., for anything beyond basic email and document sharing) understands that Microsoft (and even Microsoft + Groove) still has a very long distance to go before it catches up to Notes functionality (which is not to say that Groove and MSFT don't do useful things Notes does not do, or vice versa; they're partially-overlapping circles on a Venn diagram), and IBM/Lotus is certainly not standing still in the meantime. Gillmor does Ray a major disservice by distorting Ray's diplomatic and precise comments about Notes.